I have a T61 too, and I fully agree with Lech. Had my hardware configuration been available with an Intel adapter, I would have gone for that without much hesitation.

Instead, I tried out the 100.14.(x < 19) series, which were the first to support the NVS 140M, but got frequent hard lockups. The advice given by the Nvidia people on these issues ranged from "Downgrade to an older version" (haha) or use some freakish boot option that either cripples my system (like maxcpus=1) or makes it run hot (like idle=poll).

IMHO, complaining is no use. The Nvidia people more or less direct everybody to the sticky posts, often rightfully so, in other cases it's plain impertinence, and they could often as well be replaced with very small shell scripts. So either you get working drivers ootb (which is good), or you get frequent crashes and have to use the vesa or nv drivers.

The nv driver is in a very sorry state and is not developed further. If you have high hopes for the nouveau project, then you might as well prepare for some harsh disappointments. The several rXXX projects for the ATI boards had some of the brightest minds in X development, but I had nothing but grief with 3D acceleration using the free r300 driver (ditto for the old, binary-only ATI driver, which was even worse) on my old T41p.

As much as I sympathize with this thread's effort, it will have no results. Nvidia can choose to ignore almost everything which is said here. Actually, it looks like the support given here is a private pet project of some admittedly motivated employees, and they deserve some praise for that.

The only way things are going to change is when Nvidia is feeling financial pressure because of the better Intel or ATI/AMD cards with high-quality (now free) drivers. Up to now, the Nvidia drivers have (sadly for the free Nvidia drivers, sometimes good for the users) been "good enough", and the best choice for Linux users. That might change now. The old argument that he (i.e. Nvidia or ATI) who opens his specs first, will be sued because of patent infringements might not hold as before, though I think that AMD is in a much better position than Nvidia to fight off any such claims.

As long as the situation remains as it is right now, we can just silently rejoice in the fact that Windows Vista and 64bit Windows users (XP or Vista) have the same problems with their hardware.